How to adjust widescreen TV aspect ratio?
Question about widescreen TVs: I’m going to buy my 1st widescreen, a small 32″ LCD Samsung. I’ve seen quite a few widescreen TVs mostly in public places that seem to have the aspect ratio screwed up. Specifically, people appear way too short and wide. Is there an adjustment on these TV’s to correct for this?
Answer #1: Thats a 4:3 picture : FilmGiant : 3/4/07 12:21 AM
in STRETCH MODE made to fit a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio. In other words, the store was not feeding the monitor an HD widescreen signal.
There are generally 3 modes. Wide, Stretch and ZOOM. Wide is normal for an HD signal but SD signals will appear with letterboxing on the left and right of the picture. To fill the screen, some people use the stretch mode. This stretches the SD signal (4:3) to fill the space, making people look short and fat.
The ZOOM mode will actually ZOOM into the 4:3 image, filling the screen but cutting off heads and feet slightly, as well as info crawls at the bottom of the screen.
Sooooo….if you want to watch SD shows on and HD set, you’re either going to have short fat people, people with trimmed heads and feet, or black letterboxing on the right and left of picture.
Answer #2: Stretching depends on your set. A high end Sony which I have does a great job in stretch mode. You really can’t tell the difference most of the time as it looks like a good standard non HD set. HD signals aren’t in stretch mode; the native resolution is 720p,1080i,16×9,and that is in a full screen mode on your HD set.
Some sets only stretch a portion of the screen, usually the portion where the least action occurs on both sides of center. But when an image passes from right to left or vice versa across the entire screen there are always telltale signs in my experience.
Answer #3: I have the 3251D, which is one of the 32″ Samsungs. I love it. If you leave it in 16:9 mode, it detects whether or not the signal is HD/widescreen or not. It will add the “side” letterboxes like the picture shown above when the signal is in 4:3. I haven’t had any channels that I found it automatically stretches. In short, I love mine (have had it since Novemeber) and I have found absolutley nothing bad about it. the 51D has a 4000:1 contrast ratio and has tons of options/other inputs.
Answer #4: I have the 40″ Samsung LCD. It’s a great set. Went with LCD because it’s located right next to a large window and the reflection off a Plasma TV would be terrible. The one thing I don’t like about the Samsung LCD is the delay/distortion on fast moving images. Also if you put the volume fairly high you get distortion out of the speakers.
Answer #5: I have the Sammy 3251d also, with Cablevision’s HD DVR box. The box has a setup wizard where you can select resolutions to output. When you do this, none of the SD channels will have bars on the side, and the images do not appear distorted. When you switch to a HD channel, the box will change resolutions automatically. There will no longer be the need to use the stretch option on your TV.